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What the Duck

Keri Miller • May 10, 2023

The Official Story of the Rubber Duck

It all started with Gordon Lightfoot. His recent passing had me remembering, not just about his iconic career and music [I remember all his songs from my youth], but of the story I’m about to tell.

 

In 2012 we produced our first high profile event in Toronto, it was the inaugural fundraiser for TIFF [Toronto International Film Festival], celebrating the 50th anniversary of James Bond. It was and is one of our most ambitious and rewarding projects in our 22 year history.

 

We created a full James Bond inspired environment and experience on the waterfront of Toronto complete with 53’ trailers as décor, a retrofitted 320’ barge customized as a pier and a 450 person dining tent with three performance stages. The storyline was adventurous and included a branded helicopter, stunts into the water and yachts as props surrounding the reception pier. Load in was seven days long and tickets to the event were $25K per table.

 

Coined The Night That Never Ends, it was a spectacle that raised a lot of money and a lot of eyebrows around this new agency [us] producing events in the city. We loved the work and we were incredibly proud of the entire team. I remember the event, the partners and the team; the event was outstanding, but mostly I remember the rain. For the majority of the load-in the weather reflected a perfectly seasonal autumn, for the 20 hours leading up to the event, it rained, it poured, it was grey and unrelenting. We called in more tenting, bought sump pumps for the torrential water collection and covered everything within the tents and on the barge with tarps… and we waited. At one point our client gathered us all inside the venue and emotionally gave us permission to change the plan and bring everything inside – no one wants to execute the contingency on events like this and we opted to prepare and wait for mother nature to change her mind.

 

40 minutes to “doors” the sky opened up and the sun beamed in, we scrambled [as event profs do] and the show went on. It was wicked if not wet, and we were exhausted.

 

Fast forward one week and I was excitedly looking through the hundreds of photos of the evening. The pictures inside the tent consisted of a beautiful foreground of performances and happy guest faces, and a wet and drippy background, and while the guests may not have noticed, it was all I could see. I began photoshopping out the ugly and scarred for posting on our website. On the centre stage at the event a variety of famous artists performed during the evening, one was the incomparable Gordon Lightfoot. As I looked at the photo of him and began scrubbing perfecting the photo, a small yellow speck caught my eye…

It was resting on the stage, very closely to a monitor and as I zoomed in a little rubber duck came into focus.

 

I remember thinking that this was an incredibly weird thing and my mind ran with things like: Did a guest put that there? Does Gordon Lightfoot like rubber duckies? Who had seen it? Why had nobody moved it? Through the evening multiple crew members, staff and stage management would have walked near that area… why was it there? I was curious, furious and wonderfully happy at the same time. I immediately sent out an email to all the crew, attached the zoomed in photo and inquired about the owner of the duck. I remember stating something like the following: I know that sometimes operators and crew have little icons, or totems that they carry at every show, like a stuffed animal, tinkerbell in a bird cage… but I’ve never seen this duck before. I think one of you placed it there as a joke, something to take the piss out of since the rain came down so hard. I said, I’m not mad, I’m curious. I want to know who did this funny thing and I want to give them credit for this oddity.

 

Other than responses of “not me”, “no idea”, “that’s crazy”, “lol”, “I wish I had”, no one fessed up. The little duck was somehow orphaned at our high-profile event.

 

What transpired since has been nothing but memorable and for those in the know, the first few years afterward there were an amazing amount of rubber duck sightings, all of which were shared with me and then I shared with others.

  • The giant rubber duck in the bay in Hong Kong
  • Photos of rubber ducks in shipping boxes from suppliers
  • A huge blow up rubber duck that was borrowed from Paul Brandts tour and inflated in my office
  • An envelope and ransom letter with rubber duck enclosed, a creative reach out from a current employee
  • Random rubber duck gifts of all sizes and shapes…

 

In the ten years since that event the rubber duck has since immersed itself into our brand, as a bit of a fun icon, we’ve used it in our client events, it has been represented on Christmas trees, they have been conversation starters. It has also seeped into my personal life, floating in my drinks at my birthday, I’ve received duck dishes, and one infamous day when I came home and my son and his friends had placed over 30 tiny rubber ducks all over my house. We found one hidden, undiscovered 6 years later when we sold our home [we hid that one in a vent for the new owners to discover].

 

This isn’t really about an item that becomes a viral collectable in the life of a single human, it’s more than that. To me the rubber duck signifies the power of events. In the gathering of humans, in the front and back of stages, we create relationships, opportunities and memories that can last a lifetime, impacting our futures and building communities. This one tiny yellow spec at the foot of Gordon Lightfoot proves that it’s not all about the big and shiny, the celebrity and the things we want audiences to pay attention to -  those are important but it’s about the one little nugget discovered by an attendee at an event that can be the inspiration that changes a life. It represents details and the need to create moments for individuals. We will never actually know what one thing a person takes from our events, conferences, productions, but that they will take something and it will be a game changer in some small way.

 

When we throw the duck to each other in our team videos, we are in fact passing on the power of awesome.

 

The originator of the duck on the stage deck has never come forward, none of our “rainy day people” have fessed up and the mystery is alive and well, I have my inklings… wink, wink, but please never tell.

 

WTD. 

[What the Duck]

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